On this day: Braer disaster report accuses captain of wrongdoing

Report into the Braer tanker disaster accused the captain of a serious dereliction of duty in 1994. Picture: AFP/Getty Images

1265: England’s parliament met for first time.

1805: London Docks opened.

1841: Hong Kong was ceded by China, in what was termed the “Unequal Treaties”, after the Opium Wars, and was first occupied by Britain.

1846: The Reverend Matthias Lloyd-Thomas of Cwmbran, South Wales, officiated at his 3,000th funeral - the burial of his 95-year-old father. In his 61 years as a minister, he preached more than 10,000 sermons, although he was stone deaf.

1882: Coxon & Co, drapers, of Newcastle upon Tyne, became the first shop in Britain to be lit by incandescent electric light.

1887: United States Senate approved leasing Pearl Harbour in Hawaii as naval base.

1892: The game of basketball, devised by a Canadian doctor, James Naismith, was first played at the YMCA in Springfield, Massachusetts.

1910: Canberra officially became the capital of Australia.

1925: Soviet Union and Japan formed alliance.

1925: Britain and China signed Treaty of Peking.

1936: King Edward VIII acceded to the throne on the death of King George V. He was to abdicate after 325 days, on 10 December, after causing a constitutional crisis by proposing marriage to divorcée Wallis Simpson.

1942: Adolf Eichmann and Reinhard Heydrich met to draw up plans for the Final Solution.

1964: British forces quelled mutinies of Tanganyika Rifles and troops in Uganda and Kenya.

1971: Four members of RAF Red Arrows aerobatics display team were killed in mid-air collision.

1987: Terry Waite, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s special envoy in the Middle East, was kidnapped while negotiating the release of western hostages in Beirut.

1990: Soviet troops stormed Azerbaijani capital of Baku, leaving dozens dead and wounded, as president Mikhail Gorbachev defended action on national television.

1991: In Moscow, hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens protested against bloody crackdown on Lithuania and demanded resignation of Mikhail Gorbachev.

1991: Captured RAF pilots were paraded on Iraqi television.

1994: Official report into the Braer tanker disaster on the Shetland coast accused the captain of a serious dereliction of duty.

ANNIVERSARIES

Births: 1878 Finlay Currie, Scottish actor; 1888 Lead Belly (born Huddie William Ledbetter), folk and blues musician; 1908 Ian Peebles, Aberdeen-born journalist and England Test cricketer; 1910 Joy Adamson, wildlife conservationist; 1906 Aristotle Onassis, shipowner; 1920 DeForest Kelley, actor (Star Trek); 1945 Christopher Martin-Jenkins, cricket journalist, commentator and president of MCC.

Deaths: 250AD Pope Fabian; 1770 Charles Yorke, Lord Chancellor of Great Britain; 1819 King Carlos IV of Spain; 1936 King George V; 1983 Garrincha, footballer; 1984 Johnny Weissmuller, Olympic swimming champion and screen Tarzan; 1990 Barbara Stanwyck, film actress; 1993 Audrey Hepburn, actress; 1994 Sir Matt Busby CBE, Scottish football manager and player; 2012 Etta James, singer-songwriter